By Hasan Mansoor
(Written in November 2011)
Shah Mehmood Qureshi can conveniently be regarded as the greatest of all hypocrites and power-hungry individuals who are jumping on Imran Khan’s bandwagon.
His hypocrisy is evident from the religious allegories he had associated in his speech in Ghotki, where he finally ended his role as the fence-sitter and joined Imran’s Tehrik-e-Insaaf.
A show in Ghotki can never be applied on the whole Sindh. Ghotki is the smallest of Sindh’s border districts, taken hostage by the influential tribes, whose chiefs are as opportunist and corrupt as elsewhere. They boast on honour killing of women and harbour and nurture criminals to keep people in distress and manipulate election results to their own advantage.
Local people confirm that majority of the participants of Qureshi’s rally were unknown to them. They had been transported in trucks and lorries from the bordering southern Punjab’s towns.
“Some of the participants were provided by the influential Mahers of the district, while the rest might form the total supporters of Qureshi who revere him because of his being a gaddi-nasheen of a shrine,” a local political observer told me.
This rally cannot be regarded as something, which reflects a change in the mood of Sindhis. Both Qureshi and Imran Khan stick to their guns against the government. They spoke of the so-called corrupt practices being committed by Zardari’s government, bragged about their being the clean entities and hit hard against the Sharifs.
Actually, they discussed Punjab’s politics in Sindh. Both the PTI leaders have stakes in Punjab and they see little prospects in Sindh, the question remains why they chose a place elsewhere to fight for Punjab? Qureshi wanted to show his popularity on trans-provincial scale while Imran was keen to see his bag gets fully stuffed.
But, none of them spoke about the worst miseries of Sindh caused by the floods the second year running. They talked about the ambiguous NRO controversy, war on terror, United States, Pakistan’s vague sovereignty and Afghanistan and Iraq but deemed it inappropriate to talk on the real problems of Sindh.
Qureshi, on the occasion, went on to the religious allegories in his speech, which hardly impress Sindhis’ secular minds. Spectacular of all was when he put himself in the shoes of Central Asian warrior Mehmood Ghaznavi by saying he would attack on Somnaath’s temple. He said his rally’s day coincided with the advent of the holy Islamic month of Muharram which, according to him, was a good omen to the country’s secured fate.
Qureshi received an immediate bashing from across the southern province’s intelligentsia who condemn him for his desire to attack a temple no matter that was a clichéd symbolic notion.
“Sindhis have always respected the worship places of all faiths and cannot tolerate or appreciate such clichés, which have been created and safeguarded by the powerful establishment,” said one of several statements published in the Sindhi newspapers.
Sindhis have the history not to support the religious bigots. They still keep their religion and routine life separate despite the deep state’s repeated attempts to corrupt it through the kidnapping and persecution of minority Hindus and their girls’ forced conversion by the mullahs whose sanctuaries are being expanded systematically.
Imran might take time to keep his finger on the pulse of Sindh, but why Qureshi went so aggressive in his panegyric to his brand-new leader, though he is well accustomed to the Sindhi environs. He is in the process of changing his posture that suits his new party’s right-wing propensities. He wants the people to forget his popular images with Secretary Hillary Clinton showing him sharing broad smiles with his then counterpart whom now he strategically despises.
One should admire Zardari for his prudent decision in 2008 not to select Qureshi as party’s nominee for the country’s next prime minister. Zardari must have foreseen Qureshi’s hypocoristic leanings that many critics did not.His hypocrisy is evident from the religious allegories he had associated in his speech in Ghotki, where he finally ended his role as the fence-sitter and joined Imran’s Tehrik-e-Insaaf.
A show in Ghotki can never be applied on the whole Sindh. Ghotki is the smallest of Sindh’s border districts, taken hostage by the influential tribes, whose chiefs are as opportunist and corrupt as elsewhere. They boast on honour killing of women and harbour and nurture criminals to keep people in distress and manipulate election results to their own advantage.
Local people confirm that majority of the participants of Qureshi’s rally were unknown to them. They had been transported in trucks and lorries from the bordering southern Punjab’s towns.
“Some of the participants were provided by the influential Mahers of the district, while the rest might form the total supporters of Qureshi who revere him because of his being a gaddi-nasheen of a shrine,” a local political observer told me.
This rally cannot be regarded as something, which reflects a change in the mood of Sindhis. Both Qureshi and Imran Khan stick to their guns against the government. They spoke of the so-called corrupt practices being committed by Zardari’s government, bragged about their being the clean entities and hit hard against the Sharifs.
Actually, they discussed Punjab’s politics in Sindh. Both the PTI leaders have stakes in Punjab and they see little prospects in Sindh, the question remains why they chose a place elsewhere to fight for Punjab? Qureshi wanted to show his popularity on trans-provincial scale while Imran was keen to see his bag gets fully stuffed.
But, none of them spoke about the worst miseries of Sindh caused by the floods the second year running. They talked about the ambiguous NRO controversy, war on terror, United States, Pakistan’s vague sovereignty and Afghanistan and Iraq but deemed it inappropriate to talk on the real problems of Sindh.
Qureshi, on the occasion, went on to the religious allegories in his speech, which hardly impress Sindhis’ secular minds. Spectacular of all was when he put himself in the shoes of Central Asian warrior Mehmood Ghaznavi by saying he would attack on Somnaath’s temple. He said his rally’s day coincided with the advent of the holy Islamic month of Muharram which, according to him, was a good omen to the country’s secured fate.
Qureshi received an immediate bashing from across the southern province’s intelligentsia who condemn him for his desire to attack a temple no matter that was a clichéd symbolic notion.
“Sindhis have always respected the worship places of all faiths and cannot tolerate or appreciate such clichés, which have been created and safeguarded by the powerful establishment,” said one of several statements published in the Sindhi newspapers.
Sindhis have the history not to support the religious bigots. They still keep their religion and routine life separate despite the deep state’s repeated attempts to corrupt it through the kidnapping and persecution of minority Hindus and their girls’ forced conversion by the mullahs whose sanctuaries are being expanded systematically.
Imran might take time to keep his finger on the pulse of Sindh, but why Qureshi went so aggressive in his panegyric to his brand-new leader, though he is well accustomed to the Sindhi environs. He is in the process of changing his posture that suits his new party’s right-wing propensities. He wants the people to forget his popular images with Secretary Hillary Clinton showing him sharing broad smiles with his then counterpart whom now he strategically despises.
But, haven’t Imran started sipping hypocrisy when he gives a clean chit as the foreign minister to Qureshi in Ghotki, an individual whom he had criticised him in his book “Pakistan A Personal History”.
He writes: “These loans, along with US and European aid money, are like bribes to the Pakistani political elite to keep fighting America’s war for them. This was painfully evident when in October 2010 Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told the European parliament: ‘If you want to help us fight extremism and terrorism, one way of doing that is making Pakistan economically stable.’ Pakistan’s ruling elite threatens the West with fears about Islamic militancy to extract more money out of them.”
We should still admire Imran Khan, after all, he is the saviour we the poor souls have been waiting for the salvation!
Ends
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